Using AI to Know Your Prospects with Collin Mitchell

Artificial Intelligence (AI), was an already on-fire topic that has recently exploded.

It makes sense that companies and sales teams are starting to invest in smarter conversational AI—for instance, AI that pulls history and experience into the conversation, while also using emotional recognition tools to better understand the context of a customer’s inquiry.

After all, when conversations become deeper and more complex, businesses are able to gather much more data about the customer and answer their problems at a faster rate. Yet, in order for customers to latch on to this step of the journey, the conversation must be humanized.\

Is AI ready for this level of humanization and how can we really use these tools today to really get to know our prospects?

On this episode of Evolved Sales Live, host Jonathan Fischer sits down with Collin Mitchell, Head of Sales at Humanistic AI, to dive deep into the “mind” of AI and discuss using it to learn the in's and outs of your prospect.

Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn for more engaging sales insights and discussions! Happy watching!

Meet Collin:

Collin Mitchell is the host of the Sales Transformation Podcast, Head of Sales at Humanistic AI, and is dedicated to helping revenue leaders increase close rates by 7.2% with a hyper-personalized sales process! He has grown multiple 7-figure companies fueled by outbound sales. He's also the host of Sales Transformation, a podcast featuring the best sales hustlers. One of Collin's current goals is to change the way people sell through relationship building.

Check out the transcription of this webinar episode below!

Jonathan Fischer 0:04

Welcome back to the Evolve sales leader recorded live right here on LinkedIn every Friday. I'm Jonathan Fisher, your host. One of the hottest topics in business today is artificial intelligence or AI? What is this technology capable of? And how can we effectively apply it to business development and sales today? We're here to discuss that with us today is Colin Mitchell. Colin is head of sales at the fast growing tech company, Humana tech.ai. And he's built a significant online presence as a thought leader in sales, offering insights for better go to market strategies, especially for founders via his newsletter, the sales transformation newsletter. Colin, it's fantastic to have you on the show today. Welcome.

Collin Mitchell 0:49

Yeah, I've been looking forward to it. Thanks for having me on the show. This is a hot topic that I love talking about. So I know we're gonna have a lot of fun. And hopefully we get some good questions. So

Jonathan Fischer 0:58

yeah, absolutely. We're going to have a great conversation and a friendly reminder to the audience. It's a live show, for good reason. So start posting your questions in chat, we will have a q&a at the end. And in the course of our conversation, today, we're going to be exploring the implications of AI for doing business in the years to come. We're gonna talk about some of the powerful ways that you can leverage this technology for better sales results, including some specific tools you can use and action steps you can take right away to grow your pipeline, close more deals, call them, that's a promise we're making it. We're going to keep that today, brother,

Collin Mitchell 1:28

we are going to do our best. And if not, maybe the AI will jump in and do it for us.

Jonathan Fischer 1:35

I love it. I love it. We'll call it real quick, just by way of introduction share briefly, what do you do? there@humanik.ai?

Collin Mitchell 1:42

Yeah, so I'm the head of sales at HumanIK AI, where we help sales teams personalize the entire sales process, using obviously AI. So I have the pleasure of helping sales teams, increase their positive reply rates, increase their first time engagement, increase their close rates, by leveraging the personality insights that HumanIK AI provides them.

Jonathan Fischer 2:07

Well, sounds like we have the right guy to talk to you today. So that's good deal. So AI, it is a hot topic, as I mentioned, a lot of conversation about what are the implications of this thing? I mean, some folks are even kind of getting a little bit alarmist about it perhaps like, is this going to take over our jobs? And is it going to put people out of work across a whole range? Whether it's tech people or salespeople? What what are the implications of artificial intelligence? As you see it?

Collin Mitchell 2:31

Yeah, I think that there is a lot of people that are of that, you know, camp of being scared of it, right, thinking that it's going to replace their jobs or do their jobs better than they can do it. And, you know, with some good reason, you know, AI is still, you know, it's maturing at a very fast pace. So where AI is today, versus where it was six months or even a year ago, are vastly different. And then, you know, recently, when, you know, things like chat, GPT, three came out and, you know, made a lot of noise and went to like a million users in a couple of days. And people really started freaking out. And you saw a lot of people on socialists, you know, really just sort of saying it's not good doesn't work, you know, all of these things. And part of it is not knowing how to properly use it to your benefit as a seller. And the reality is, is it's here, it's here to stay, and it's only going to get better. So sales teams really need to start to look at how do we embrace this? How do we integrate it into what we do, so that we can be more productive so that we can be more efficient, and so we can do our jobs better?

Jonathan Fischer 3:44

So is it fair to say that your view is that this is not a threat, but rather a new tool that we can leverage if we do so effectively?

Collin Mitchell 3:51

Yeah, I mean, especially with the current market conditions, right? We all know that, you know, the stock market's down, there's layoffs all the time. I mean, there's just a lot going on, where there's a, you know, immense amount of financial insecurity. And ultimately, what that means for a lot of sales organizations today, is they're trying to figure out how do we do more with less. And AI is a great thing that can help your already you know, trained team be more productive in a lot of ways or, you know, help do things that they're required to do that they typically don't like doing. That they bring their own bias into, which could be you know, messaging or writing copy or building lists or, you know, mundane CRM tasks. These are all things that there's AI tools available today to help solve for and if you have a you know, sales team, you want your sales team focused on what you know, I call revenue generating activities. That's how having conversations with potential customers, current customers to maybe expand deals, and the more time that they can spend doing those things, and leverage the power of AI to do a lot of these other things for them, then they can be really high performing.

Jonathan Fischer 5:18

So and there really is, there's a lot of conversation out there about to what extent the bar even wants human interaction? That's a big part of the conversation, isn't it? Like, if you're, if you're the founder, you know, some people even talking about maybe I don't want that much human interaction involved? If that's what the buyer wants, I really I want this technology to go all the way. Let's come at it from that side, like what are what are some of the advantages of pushing it to the limit on the technology side?

Collin Mitchell 5:45

Yeah, I mean, I don't think that it highly depends on what it is that you sell, like, you know, people are making bigger purchases these days now, like fully digital, without any interaction, right. And we're already seeing that happen. Even, you know, people buying cars, you know, online from an app before they've ever even driven them, right, like crazy to think that that's kind of where we're at today, where, you know, the buying experience of just a car was very different prior to that. So, and also with, you know, sort of, let's say, the younger generation of people, a lot of them would prefer text messages or not to get on the phone or not have as much human interaction. So I think that it's not going to completely go away. And I think it also highly depends on what it is that you sell, you know, how complex that is, how consultative, you need to be in that interaction, where there's always still gonna be a need for, you know, a human being to be part of that.

Jonathan Fischer 6:53

Yeah. Do you think that maybe even like transaction size, and maybe how many share shareholders are involved in the decision? Does that all play into that as well? Would you say?

Collin Mitchell 7:02

Yeah, absolutely. I'd say, you know, if it's a highly transactional thing, then people would rather just buy now, right, and not have to deal with a salesperson, and for good reason, because there's a lot of people that don't do sales the right way. And, you know, you typically hear about the sleazy salesperson or the pushy salesperson, and a lot of people don't want to deal with that for a good reason. And so there's a lot of things that they would rather just purchase without dealing with a salesperson if they could. And but the the bigger that the transaction comes, the more complex the solution is, and the more people involved in that decision, there's always going to need to be human interaction there.

Jonathan Fischer 7:47

Okay, so let's go back to the other side, your contention is this is a powerful tool we can leverage and in fact, if anything, it should be a time saver, allowing the true professional and sales do what she is most productive and doing having conversations actually getting exploring the opportunity and see if you can close that deal for her company. So why don't we start with this? What are some of those kinds of rote activities that sales folks don't like doing that go on our list of things that this technology could come in? And help us with?

Collin Mitchell 8:18

Yeah, I mean, let's there's, there's, there's a few of them, right? But let's let's, let's tackle the most obvious one, CRM tasks, CRM tasks, and, you know, every sales leader out there has dealt with their fair share of salespeople that just won't continuously update the CRM properly. It's

Jonathan Fischer 8:47

there's a period after each one of those phrases, just the way you said that and yeah, I'm with you. Yeah, 100 was

Collin Mitchell 8:51

just just really want to, you know, drive that one home just just a little bit, because it's a, it's a pain, it's a real pain, because nobody wants to be a micromanager type sales leader breathing down the neck of their sales team to just update the CRM, right, there's just way better things that the sales leader and the sellers can be spending their time doing. But it's a very important piece, right? If you're running any sizable, you know, it's even a small or sales organization, but more relevant. In larger sales organizations, like we've got to be making decisions based on data. And if the CRM is not totally accurate, as it should be, well, then we can't make good decisions. Right. And so that's why it's a really, really important piece. But there's tools, there's tons of tools out there that will you know, use AI to automatically update Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever CRM that you use, so that the salesperson doesn't have to.

Jonathan Fischer 9:54

Okay, nice. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I do think that there may be a correlation between the kind of person who's great Selling, and that that person might not be great at updating the details anyway, right? A lot of a lot of times, and this is maybe some folks will argue with me on this. But I do think there's a correlation there, the personality that can be in the moment, be very personable. They're so engaged the conversation, those details do feel like a hindrance. What a great Lifesaver could be to have this handled for you, like, so what's that look like? Are there plugins that can work with some of the big name CRMs that are out there? They've already got the API's in place, or like, how do we practically apply that?

Collin Mitchell 10:29

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a bunch of them, right tools, like Dooley or rattle. I mean, there's a bunch, you know, dually is probably one of the more well known ones, and there's quite a few others, you know, they can automatically update things for you work directly in your messaging app, or, you know, update things. scratchpad is another one, I mean, there's just, you know, these tools that you know, live in other places that will, you know, update the CRM for you, you know, based on things that are happening. So, I think that it is a huge pain point, where I think it makes a lot of sense, you know, and you can get some huge productivity gains for your sales team, in order to, you know, get them focusing on the things that are going to drive more revenue.

Jonathan Fischer 11:17

All right, so number one thing AI can actually do for the sales pro is CRM tasks. What else?

Collin Mitchell 11:24

Wow, all right. So let's see, the next one would be, you know, list building, right list building. You know, I think most people, most mature sales organizations, you know, don't have a person researching their leads, maybe they do if they're doing some, really, maybe they have some really tough, you know, targets, or they need some additional, like personalization and research information. But there's a ton of tools like seamless and zoom info and sales entail, and cognitivism, and all these tools that use, you know, AI to go out there and find relevant contact information about your buyers, you know, that could be as simple as title, company information, revenue size technology that uses even intent data, like have these, you know, are these particular contexts in market for the solution that I sell? So I'd say that's a, that's a big one, where, you know, most teams are using something like that. Now, in those cases, you know, I mentioned a lot of different options there. They're not all perfect, I see a lot of sales organizations today, using like, potentially two, sometimes even three of those to get full coverage of what they actually need.

Jonathan Fischer 12:41

So that all makes a lot of sense that when it comes to some of these vendors of like lists and other insights into contact data, it I often hear skeptics in sales, saying I could just go to LinkedIn, or I can just Google around like, do you feel that that intent data? Are you seeing evidence that that stuff is on point? It has a lot of value? What What's your opinion on that? That part of it?

Collin Mitchell 13:05

Yeah, I it's not, you know, I mean, any do you really want if your sales rep, like, do you really want to be gone out there trying to, you know, use your time to figure that stuff out on your own? I would say no, right. But, you know, let's say you maybe you're on a tight budget, because you know, some of these tools are not cheap. It maybe makes sense in that case, or maybe you have, you know, let's say you don't want to go the route of using AI for your list building, well, then you should at least have like a dedicated researcher or somebody that you know, some sort of analyst that builds these lists for you, because salespeople should not be spending their time building lists. And unfortunately, you still see that today, there is a lot of sales teams that just kind of have a free for all of you know, building their own list. And there's just better things that their time can be spent on than building lists. I say, let the AI do it for you. If you're not going to go that route, at least have a dedicated, maybe more junior person that does those sort of tasks.

Jonathan Fischer 14:10

Yeah, maybe even enablement. People could take that on as part of their task perhaps, if you have it, anybody have that in your structure? When it comes to these choosing, among these different applications, do you think it's really important that you have a good integration with LinkedIn? How key would that be in your view?

Collin Mitchell 14:27

Yeah, I mean, if you're selling into b2b, LinkedIn is the you know, at the core of probably most everything that you would do, hopefully, you know, social selling is becoming more and more part of a sales strategy that we were seeing work very effectively and in a lot of different ways, which is a whole nother rabbit hole that we could we could go down. But yeah, I think that a lot of there you see a lot of tools that are working off of LinkedIn or or LinkedIn is part of how the solution does work, right. So like, perfect example, a lot of the list building tools, you know, they're starting with LinkedIn as sort of the the centerpiece to then get you the information that's available online from that particular person. So LinkedIn is a good source to tie back to, you know, hey, this is this particular person, and then what can we find on this person? We can't hear you.

Jonathan Fischer 15:37

I agree with that, for better for worse, and I think it's mostly for better use. LinkedIn really is a great starting point. For all of those activities. That's where all the business people, are there more more users of LinkedIn, and there are citizens in the United States. So that should tell you. It's a good place to be. Is

Collin Mitchell 15:52

that a is that a? Is that a real fact from a human or from Ai? Ah,

Jonathan Fischer 15:56

that's a good question. I'll get back to you. While I'm checking on that, I want to mention speaking of really great tools that every business development leader owes it to him or herself to know about, and that is overpassed. We're very proudly powered by the overpass platform. Those are fantastic people overpass.com They know how to integrate great technology with fantastic people, what do they do, they help you get talent to fill your team very quickly, highly qualified reps to be STRS, AES, whatever, you need to grow quickly, especially if you're tech, especially if you are funded. This is your platform, check them out, you can create a free account@overpass.com. One more mentioned, as well. Overpass is sponsoring a really great event that's going to follow up today's conversation on AI is going to be coming up here soon on January the 19th. From 3pm to 7pm, there's gonna be a panel of 12 different business experts discussing the topic, keep an eye on the overpass.com LinkedIn page for more information on that event. All right. So I mean, AI, it is an interesting thing, it's a little bit, it's got a little bit of a sexy factor to it. If I if I can say that, though, too, right? It's kind of a cool thing. So I think a lot of folks want to embrace it. Are there some key ways that we can actually get into that? I'm gonna circle back to that question in a minute. Like, what if you're an individual producer, maybe we can circle back and talk about what is some of the immediate ways that an individual can get, get some leverage using this technology, because as we all know, you know, decisions are made in various ways and various companies, right. So let's give an edge to that producer at the end. And then while we're at it, let's give an edge to the leader that's listening, because this is all about evolve sales leaders. But let's, first let's finish our list. We've got CRM tasks, we got list building, give us a next, what's the next one on your list of things AI can do?

Collin Mitchell 17:45

Yeah, so I would say my next favorite, and this is relevant for both individual contributors and extremely relevant for sales leaders would be conversational intelligence. So actually taking your sales calls, and putting them in a to a tool, like a gong, or wingman or chorus, where you can analyze those calls and look for certain things. And also coach your reps on the things that they might need the most help with another really powerful use case of using a tool like that is also referring back to it, you know, for you know, next steps and making sure that you, you know, properly qualified through your discovery call or you didn't miss anything or any details that you need for next steps. So, conversational. Intelligence with a tool, like Gong, or chorus or wingman is a really powerful use of AI.

You're on mute, your mute.

Jonathan Fischer 18:52

Sorry about that. Thank you, Delia, some congestion. So I'm hitting a button. I never used to. Little operator error there. Sorry, audience. But so what you're saying there is that literally, I could take the recording and plug it through the demo, it must be an add on if it's gone, or whatever the solution might be. And without me having to sit and listen to me, it's going to pick up some things, whether they were done well or not according to criteria that I can set. Is that Is that close to correct?

Collin Mitchell 19:18

Yeah, so a couple things. You know, there's a few different solutions out there that work slightly differently and maybe have some feature sets over other ones. So I've even seen this now where it can happen live. So there's a solution called trellis which uses AI when you know your sales team is making cold calls and gives you coaching in real time, based on that cold call. And then we have solutions like wingman which you know, shows up to your zoom calls, shows up to even your regular calls that you might be making, from any sort of like telephony solution, records those transcribes them, even can give you real time feedback as well. So maybe there's particular things that come up in conversations that can identify some areas where it could cause a deal to get stuck or need authority. And can also give you, you know, sort of, you know, feedback on how to structure that call properly in real time. But then the great use case is then being able to refute review those and go back to it, and also rate those calls. You know, another great feature that all of these solutions have is also seen how much you're talking versus how much your prospect is talking? Because that's something really important to pay attention to, am I just pitching at my prospect constantly? Or am I asking good questions and learning good information on that call, which is typically going to result in a more sound discovery call that took place?

Jonathan Fischer 20:50

Well, that's pretty amazing. That sounds extremely helpful for the manager that wants to make sure the team is operating as they should, is, especially you know, there's this whole notion of they used to call it the sophomore slump, right, you get a team ramped up to performing well, the numbers are hidden, and give it about 90 days. And it typically hit a slump somewhere around that zone, right? Maybe by engaging with these tools, we can either avoid that, or we'll figure out exactly why it's happening. And maybe, maybe keep that valley from getting so deep, right, and keep them performing where they should.

Collin Mitchell 21:21

Yeah, I mean, it helps you really identify who on your team needs help in very specific areas, right, just because somebody maybe isn't getting a lot of sales calls from first call. The second call, doesn't necessarily mean that they stink at Discovery, it might just mean that there's one particular thing that they're missing. And with the power of AI and these tools, you can really zoom in on that stuff and focus on that particular area that they need help with, rather than just thinking, hey, they stink at Discovery.

Jonathan Fischer 21:50

Yeah. Amen. So is there is there another area where AI can really assist the sales professional?

Collin Mitchell 21:57

Well, I would say we're seeing a lot of, you know, talk about chat, GBT three, and a lot of these tools that are helping, right personalization, you know, little selfish plug a little, you know, is is what we're doing at HumanIK it which is providing personality insights based on the digital footprint of your prospects. So based on the digital footprint of your prospect, you know, HumanIK AI can give you the personality type of that person and then give you insights into, you know, what a winning strategy would be with them, or sales landmines or traps to avoid or what their communication styles and preferences are. So we're giving people people graphics, the, you know, you hear a lot of these data products give you like techno graphics, and all these other things. But we give you people graphics into your prospects, to personalize the way that you sell so that you can sell the way your buyers want to buy.

Jonathan Fischer 22:56

Sounds really powerful. So is this has this been affected by some of the recent changes in Google, where you know, your ability to put a pixel here and there is maybe a little different today than it was last year? Is that a sort of an error? Yeah,

Collin Mitchell 23:10

so there's definitely Yeah, there's definitely some marketing use cases. At the moment, we're pretty focused on like, the sales segment and how people can leverage this. So there's really two ways you can kind of look at it, you know, in this is more relevant for sales and marketing, your targeting, right? Is there particular types of people, every seller has been in a situation where they felt like they just really matched with the prospect like, hey, it was just easy, didn't feel like a lot of work we got along well. And then there's the opposite, where you're like, yeah, just wasn't really jiving, right. And so that's because of compatibility. compatibility is a problem. So you see a lot of sales teams typically assigned counts, based on geography, size industry, all of these sorts of things that matter, not as much, but what about actually aligning your sales team with people that you know, they're going to be compatible with. So not taking away those other things, but adding an extra layer of having sellers deal with people that they're compatible with on a personality level. The second component there is being able to be a seller that can adapt to the way that your buyer wants to buy because that's the level of personalization and customization that buyers are looking for today, if you want to stand out.

Jonathan Fischer 24:33

Well, I think that's very true. We're all we're all looking for something that fits there's so much noise that's part of it, isn't it is we're looking something it seems like it really is tailored to us. A lot of that is subconscious of course. Is is this is the capability there for this to even influence like let's say a different buyers journey in terms of the marketing and support piece that goes along with selling.

Collin Mitchell 24:54

Yeah, I mean, there is because one thing about people right and This is using the power of AI to be more authentic to the people you're dealing with. Because most sales motions are built around personas. And this is the playbook. And we're trying to get our buyers to come along this journey based on the sales playbook that has been built out. But if we flip that upside down for a second and say, Wait, we want to be more personalized, we want to be more human, we want to be more authentic, we want to be more customizable and adaptable to the way that people want to buy. Well, you can use the power of AI to give you information about these people. So then you can customize what that playbook looks like based on the buyer journey that's going to best suit that particular person, based on their communication styles and preferences based on the things that they care about. Most, a lot of sales teams are taught that, hey, you should go in and build rapport and small talk. And pleasantries are the way to build a winning connection. Well, and then you have people that say, Hey, relationships don't matter. If you solve a problem, then they'll buy from you. And the reality is, those two schools of thought are both wrong, because the only thing that matters is who you're dealing with, whether you go with one approach versus the other.

Jonathan Fischer 26:25

I think you make a really a real key point there, because it's not all just one thing. If you're a really top sales professional, you probably are a little bit of a student of human personality. I would love to come into a sales conversation, knowing more about the personality of my prospect that sounds extremely powerful. So what are some great tips Colin, for an individual producer to immediately begin to leverage some of this stuff with or without buy in from their leadership?

Collin Mitchell 26:50

Yeah, so I mean, I think that, you know, reading personality is is challenging. And it's as a seller, you're always going to default back to whatever your personality type is. So like, a really good thing to do is to know yourself first, right? Like know what your personality type is, know what your communication styles and preferences are, know how you would want to be sold to, if you are a buyer, right? That's a really good place to start. And then you can study the other types of bit. And then you can start to pick up cues and things of, you know, are people a little bit more slower pace? Are they more early adopter? Are they most more focused on like, ROI? And how aligned with their goals are? Or does it feel like relationships are more important to them? Read into their own communication, you know, how they write messages? Is it more, you know, buttoned up and proper? Or is it a little bit more relaxed and informal and more exciting. So you can look for those sorts of things in mere, what it is that you're, you know, getting from from your prospect, either via written communication, or you know, in conversation over zoom. So you once you know yourself first, then you can start to look for some of these things, and you can kind of mirror that.

Jonathan Fischer 28:09

Well, I love it. And we're getting a lot of activity in our chat. I know, we're going to continue on. Listen, q&a here very shortly. But Colin, you've had a really neat offer, like to have you share with your audience. Now, if you would. Tell us more about that.

Collin Mitchell 28:21

Yeah, so anybody who is interested in you know, being able to understand the personality of their prospects, and wants to be able to personalize the entire sales process, from prospecting, to closing, they can go to humanik.ai, they can download a free trial. Start with your own profile, first, run it on some people that you know, and some prospects, and just follow the prompts there that coaches you on how to deal with that particular personality type.

Jonathan Fischer 28:54

Well, I love it. I think this has already been a really, really helpful conversation. Let's jump into q&a. And I know there's others who may want to drop your questions in, go for it, we are going to get into this even further. So right out of the gate, one question that we were asked here on just a moment ago was, let's see here, we find it in from Amy, how can we learn to be a little more intentional with this? Amy asks, in terms of, you know, all the personality types using technology like HumanIK?

Collin Mitchell 29:21

Yeah, I mean, I think that to be intentional about using it. You know, I think it starts with not trying to, like automate this process too much. Right. I think that's where a lot of people, you know, get sort of get into trouble is like looking for that silver bullet of how can I leverage technology to accelerate what I could do so that I can work less and so it starts with really having a good foundation and process built around what it is you want to do? And then technology can you know add fuel to that rather than than trying to use technology to solve a problem? I think that's where a lot of people You know, some intentionality around like actually, you know, having a good sound process around it, and then leveraging technology to accelerate it rather than relying on technology to solve problems.

Jonathan Fischer 30:12

Yeah, I love that. I think that makes that makes a lot of sense. So somebody earlier and find this one here, two thought that we were wearing out here, treat with all due respect. I'm gonna put yours up here. I think we're going to respectfully disagree with you. But we're glad that you're on the show. You think you've been abusing the definition of AI? Maybe we have maybe we haven't. I don't know. I quickly googled it says that the definition is the development of computer systems that can perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech, recognition, decision making, and translation between languages. does this all fit? Are we going a little far afield? Is the definition getting to flex? What do you think about that?

Collin Mitchell 30:51

I think that, you know, we're talking about it in a very general, layman's terms, right? Neither one of us claim to be, you know, AI. You know, scientists are experts here, right? I mean, we're not data scientists. We're not, you know, trained AI experts. But we're talking about how people can use AI in a very practical sense in very layman's terms.

Jonathan Fischer 31:18

Yeah. Well, let me follow up with another question here. What about b2c? We have a conversation. The theme of the show is b2b Of course, but hey, what about b2c?

Collin Mitchell 31:27

Yeah, b2c, you see AI use a lot like let's say ecommerce, right, a lot of AI being used in, you know, chat bots and things like that. Also, you know, in, you know, the way that they market, there's a lot of AI technology around b2c marketing tools as well. I don't have a ton of experience with with b2c. So I couldn't talk to in depth about you know, how b2c companies are leveraging the power of AI today. Yeah.

Jonathan Fischer 31:55

Joshua asks a great question. You alluded to this a bit earlier about using AI in social selling, do you have some additional tips to share on that?

Collin Mitchell 32:02

Yeah, I mean, so partially, right. There's a lot of AI tools that will compliment LinkedIn. Right. So there's tools that will play, you know, work with LinkedIn, whether that's to write your content, whether that's to engage with people, whether that's to use it as a sort of CRM, there's tons of tools that are using AI to plug into your LinkedIn to make social selling easier for you part, I think, a lot of times, you know, social selling is this sort of really vague term that a lot of people just kind of throw around loosely, right? social selling is not, you know, using automation, and, you know, pitching in the DMS of your buyers, like that is not social selling, that's social spamming. So you know, social selling done right is using the platform to build relationships with people that you would maybe like to do business with adding value to those relationships, bringing those relationships off the platform, also providing value on the platform through content. So there's a lot of AI tools around, you know, both of those sorts of use cases of how you can do social selling, right.

Jonathan Fischer 33:10

That's excellent. Michael asked an interesting question here, too. And I think there's some validity, validity to this, what the buyer says they want, what they do in reality, and what generates the most long term profits are usually very different. To what extent do you agree with Michael, and maybe you can riff on that just a bit?

Collin Mitchell 33:27

Let me look at this question one more time. So what what are what buyers say they want and what they do in reality generates? Yes, so. Yeah, I mean, so if you're very, you know, selling something that's very, say, consultive data, right? Where like, you know, buyer thinks they want a they really need B, I think that, you know, that is a that is definitely a case, but using the power of AI, you can know very much. The funny thing is sometimes people think that they are a certain way. But they're actually a different way. And AI doesn't have any bias in there, right? Because it's working off of data, and not emotions, which you know, humans have. So if I were to guess, like, what the human says is accurate, or the AI, I think I'd go with the AI. Well,

Jonathan Fischer 34:22

I definitely see the advantage here too, right? Because human interactions is sometimes complicated by some issues. And the data is the data. So yeah, like that. With here's a question from Brett, that's interesting, too. So a lot of the conversation, I think here has been predicated that we have some sort of list to work with, right that this is some work. This was sort of working in our pipeline with AI, mostly, I think has been most of the conversation today. What about building that initial list? Intentionally? I guess it's kind of what Brent is getting out here. Right? Are there AI tools to help me go out into the world? Use my Sales Navigator? What are some complementary ways I could use tech in that setting to find the right people create Some inbound calls. Yes, probably overdid your question there, Brent sorry.

Collin Mitchell 35:03

So Brent is saying right person, right message at the right time. So that is a combination. That's a combination of tools, right. So that could be like using an AI tool to build your list. That could be using an AI tool to give you a buyer intent data. And then that could be using AI to personalize the message based on all the data that you got from the other AI tools, which could be Technographics, and seniority and any other personal information that was found online plus personality type. So you write the messaging in a way that most resonates with them. So like the perfect secret sauce there. Brent is a combination of AI tools to get right person, right message right time.

Yeah, you're on mute, mute,

Jonathan Fischer 35:54

not again. Hopefully, I'll be able to this call by next week. Sorry, everybody. GALEN asks a question that I you know, it occurred to me earlier as well, I know, attribution is difficult. And what we're talking about here is how do you know that that activity online is actually that individual you're chasing? That's true. And maybe you'd be sharing some secret sauce of your company here. But you know, I'm sure that is a challenge. What are your thoughts on? You know, how do you validate to somebody who is skeptical that this is this is work? Yeah,

Collin Mitchell 36:19

yeah, I mean, I'll be the first one to say it, like, AI is not perfect, by any means, right? There's, it's come a long way. And it's gotten pretty darn good, and very accurate, in a lot of different use cases. So in the context there of the people, so we have, we follow it follow a very, so we use NLP, and this model has been built over eight years. And we make sure that we have enough data before we say, this is the, you know, particular personality type of this person. So along with, you know, here is the personality type of this person, which there's 36 different variations of personality, we also have what's called like a confidence score. So if it's 100%, like we have enough data to be very confident that this is their type. But in some cases, you will see where it's like, Hey, we're only 67% confident that this, this is accurate, based on the amount of data that was available publicly on this person.

Jonathan Fischer 37:26

So that's interesting. 36 different types. I know Myers Briggs has 16. You guys have 36. So that's, that's interesting how you break that down? I've got a question that just occurred to me. I mean, how much does your work interact with some of the better known personality profiles that are out there such as disk? I think you said disc is one of them? Is it pretty? Pretty closely allied with that? Or have you guys ended up kind of with your own proprietary modeling for that? Yeah.

Collin Mitchell 37:48

So the HumanIK personality modeling is built off of disk, and ocean, which is also referred to as the big five. So disk and ocean are, you know, personality models that are built in a lot of these assessment tools or other things? So we use a combination of two personality modeling there to come up with the personality and have those variations of personality for people.

Jonathan Fischer 38:16

No, I have my own answer coming to mind for this one, but don't put up your anyway, LinkedIn user on unattributed says AI has every bias because it's programmed. What's your answer to that?

Collin Mitchell 38:29

I mean, is that a real person? Or is it AI? I don't know. A to che, right? I don't know. I don't know. I mean,

Jonathan Fischer 38:39

it's gonna be essential. It's gonna be essential. AI has already gotten skeptical with life. Right?

Collin Mitchell 38:44

Yeah. I mean, that's a tough one there. I mean, I think that, that the AI modeling is built off of data. There's no emotion in there. There's a lot of people don't trust the AI. They think AI is going to take over the world, put us all out of jobs. I don't know maybe those people are running around with tin tinfoil hats? I don't know.

Jonathan Fischer 39:12

Well, and the application, I think, is the heart of this question. If you're dealing with curating content in a platform where you're taking in news and other media, then that can definitely be an issue, right? You can actually tweak that thing. And I think that gets into political conversation. But that doesn't really pertain here. We're just trying to figure out what's the person likes to buy when how often and those kinds of things? And that's just hard data pretty much Correct.

Collin Mitchell 39:35

Yeah. And I think, you know, we're really talking about a b2b use case here where it's operating off of data to help sellers make better decisions, whether that's list building, CRM task, conversational intelligence, revenue, intelligence, people, graphics, personality types, like this is all data that's available publicly online. Or, you know, through Harvard, it's been accessed is to power salespeople to be more efficient. Is there AI built out there that's built to do things that are not good? Probably Probably like, I don't know, manipulate, you know, whatever. But it's not what this show is about.

Jonathan Fischer 40:16

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. Well, I don't know this has been this has been a fantastic conversation and it's feels both like I'm full and I'm not done yet. So I really appreciate you coming and getting us started on a really great sort of entree in an area a lot of folks have been talking about. I don't know how much really good information is out there right now. But thanks for coming and bringing us some great data today call it fantastic to have you on the show today.

Collin Mitchell 40:40

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's great conversation. Time flew by and you are a phenomenal host so really appreciate you having me on the show.

Jonathan Fischer 40:50

Thanks so much appreciate your kind words calling and thank you to our to you our listeners without you. It's not possible. We're gonna be right back here the same time, same station with a fantastic Victor Antonio, talking about the key ways that buyers have shifted the way they want to buy. So you can up your sales game in 2023 Come back and see us then we'll see you